Narratives about motorcycling on Northern California's back roads; Reflections on the history and geography of the North State; Memoirs and early recollections of youthful visits to towns and forests and mountaintops.
Also middle-of-the-road takes on current issues in politics and education. Middle of the road? Isn't that dangerous?

Monday, December 1, 2014

BINARY THINKING AND THE DEMISE OF THE GREATER GOOD

My UC Berkeley enrolled niece did a little research on the issue
of tuition increases juxtaposed to the text of 2012’s Proposition 30.She correctly found that Prop 30 made
no specific promises protecting tuition levels for the UC system.In a query to the Church of the Open
Road, she laments that while she doesn’t like the proposed increases, she is
appalled that those protesting are trotting out Proposition 30 as a promise
unkept.And what did I think?

Is the tuition increase a bad idea?Sure it is.The State of California can and should invest more in higher
education – back at the institution’s inception, tuition used to be free for
California residents – because, the thinking was, the more well educated a
person is, the more productive that person will be within the state’s
economy.But is the tuition
increase a back-step from a promise made when proposition 30 was passed?Of course not.It was never part of Prop 30.And that’s the detail that is
conveniently omitted when rallying the troops.The protesters appear foolish trying to employ an arrow
that’s not actually found in their quiver.Perhaps they’re way too wrapped up in how the increase
affects “me.”

As far back as I can remember (let me suggest that that goes
back to my college days, although I must admit I may not be able to recall what
I had for dinner last night) folks have been mobilized either for or against
some cause.In the 70s, it was
opposition to the war in Vietnam, something that, if I’d been paying attention
at the time, I probably would have opposed.But when demonstrators closed the college for two days in
protest, it prompted me to think less about our involvement in Southeast Asia
and more about me getting cheated out of a couple of days worth of instruction
that I’d paid for.I was a kid
who’d never left town.What did I
know of the world?It was pretty
easy to only think about myself in this instance.

Fast forward to now and we have incident after incident of protests
and disruptions promulgated by organizations promoting a what’s-in-it-for-me binary
view of an issue in order to whip up a rent-a-mob mentality among those who’re
not acclimated to looking deeply at an issue (or who have little to do with
their time that is actually constructive.)The framing of the tuition increase as a we’ve-been-cheated protest
is but one example.

Binary thinking is a scourge on
America.Binary thinking thrives
in an environment where and participants wallow in an easy and comfortable form
of intellectual laziness. It blooms when acceptance allows pesky details and truths to be left out if those ideas run
counter to the desired narrative. Binary
thinking causes people to talk over or past one another rather than with each
other.Binary thinking says that
something is either right or wrong, black or white, good or evil, moral or
immoral. In binary thinking there
is no room for discussion or compromise.Witness Ferguson.Witness immigration.Witness healthcare.Witness firearm regulation.Heck! Witness holiday gatherings for
some families.No discussion.The one who yells loudest, wins.

No-middle-ground binary thinking is what we see going on in
our public discourse, whether it is on AM talk radio, in the Twittersphere, on
Facebook.Sad circumstance.The result is anger, distrust and even
violence.Rarely, if ever,
solution.Rarely, if ever,
progress.

The thing is, somebody profits by all of this.It’s like the kid on the playground who
walks up to a another and says, “So and So thinks you’re a (fill in the
blank).Whereby “Another” gets
fired up at So and So, and if the dispute ends up in an argument or fisticuffs,
the kid who started it just sits back and enjoys the fracas.

In big-people America, the sound machine has tapped into
that path-of-least-resistance intellectual laziness to which too many of us now
succumb.The “machine” has figured
out how to use (or misuse) flashpoint words like freedom, socialism, liberty,
Nazism, liberal, “Democrat Party” – the list goes on and on – like prods. One of those words attached to an issue
an individual is concerned about can fire the person up to the point that they
don’t want to or need to see the shades of gray that really define what should
or could happen to resolve things.Fox News and Rush Limbaugh are great at this.I’m sure there are folks on the left as well.Each side only says enough to ignite
the base, then they sit back and profit.

Back when I was a kid in my teens
and early 20s, in spite of the war and the protests, we felt our generation
would be the one that could turn things around and set America – and then, of
course, the world – on the right track.(Cue John Lennon’s “Imagine.”)But somehow, we lost our way and didn’t accomplish that.About ten years ago, the publisher of
the Sacramento Bee put forth the question “When did the idealism of the Baby
Boom generation change?”I
responded (asking that it not be published) that I wasn’t sure exactly when,
but it occurred sometime between when in a president’s inaugural address we
were admonished to “Ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can
do for your country,” and when, twenty years later, a successful presidential
candidate rode into office asking the electorate: “Are you better off now than
you were four years ago?”

Somewhere in that timeframe we became binary in our
thinking. And the question was a
simple one:“Is it good for me or
is it not good for me?”The
greater good was lost somewhere.That greater good will remain lost until we return to an embrace a larger perspective and throw
off the shackles of binary thought.Once we’ve done that, we can constructively address racial divides,
immigration, healthcare, firearm regulation and, yes, UC tuition.

Heck!Even
Thanksgiving dinner might, one day, be pleasant!Wouldn’t that be cool?

About Me

Maps. Some of the best stories one encounters one encounters by reading a map. A map is the framework - the outline - upon which both history and fantasy are crafted.
Just as two people can witness an event and come up with entirely different recollections - each completely true, verifiable and accurate - two people can travel the same mapped route and come up with entirely different stories. But without the map, perhaps they'd have no story to tell.
Some of the best anthologies in my library are stuffed in my map case.